Eerie Stuff...
Charles Blow, this morning in the New York Times, on all the revolutionary/fear-mongering currently engaged in by the right:
Now, we get this report from this afternoon's Rambo-esque massacre in Pittsburgh:
Poplawski is obviously a wacko, but I can't help but be troubled by the timing...
As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.) At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota. Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling.
Now, we get this report from this afternoon's Rambo-esque massacre in Pittsburgh:
Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn't clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.... Poplawski feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon," said Edward Perkovic, his best friend.... Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said Poplawski feared that President Barack Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he "wasn't violently against Obama." Vire, 23, said Poplawski once had an Internet talk show but that it wasn't successful. He said Poplawski owned an AK-47 rifle and several powerful handguns, including a .357 Magnum.
Poplawski is obviously a wacko, but I can't help but be troubled by the timing...
posted by Robot at 5:01 PM
3 Comments:
Like they say, if you don't exercise your rights you lose em.
At least 50 people are dead from mass shooting attacks in the last few weeks, so "git yer guns!" types should be proud.
Interestingly, the online leftist magazine Counterpunch still employs Paul Craig Roberts, a Reagan-era paleocon cretin who was useful when he was excoriating Bush but now talks about how the income tax constitutes grounds for killing people in an act of rebellion:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03302009.html
Meanwhile, in a state of affairs always worth keeping in mind, US predator drones kill Pakistani and Afghani people (sorry, Senior Taliban Officials) weekly with no end in sight:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/world/asia/07drone.html?ref=world
(You have not enjoyed a good dose of cynicism until you hear Carl Levin talk about civilian casualties in the Middle East.)
Does anyone care what the fuck we're doing over there anymore? Does the slow, spotty, rather opaque "elimination" of terrorists in central Asia actually *mean* anything in the conventional terms of warfare? Think about the strange, quite loose grounds used to justify our continued bombardment of people in faraway lands -- they are our opponents in a war, where one side conveniently remains and dies in one region without actually inflicting damage on the other. An interesting state of affairs.
God, the Obama administration has seriously not prevented me from going Chomsky six ways to Sunday.
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